Neurotic Killer Clowns Attack Public Forests
Clearcut, Gifford Pinchot National Forest, Washington Cascades. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Americans who love the great outdoors are witnessing Trump’s “Plunder America First” public forest liquidation program – up close and personal. National forests are on the chopping block to ‘make them healthy.’
Hunters and local rural residents are disgusted with the rapid loss of secure habitat for elk, deer, bears and moose on public land caused by massive clearcuts and too many (‘spaghetti’) logging roads.
When the first shot rings out on opening day, big game herds pack up and leave home territories on U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands and seek refuge on private tracts where guided hunts cost more than local Montanans are able or willing to pay.
Trump’s Executive Orders decreeing environmental deregulation and higher production targets (hyper-logging) represent a throwback to 15th century enclosure laws. Hyper-logging devalues secure habitat and displaces wildlife from public forests, while handing timber companies below-cost logs and windfall benefits. The local peasantry pays in triplicate. They’re forced to subsidize forest destruction, denied the experience of ‘fair chase’ hunting, and robbed of their historic source of wild meat that fed Montana’s working families for generations.
The conversion of forest ‘commons’ into single-use fiber plantations is a new form of privatization, annihilating what remains of the public trust doctrine. Trump, Inc. has subverted the original intent of the Multiple-Use, Sustained Yield Act of 1960. Deregulation circumvents all attempts to protect and restore the sustainable rural cultural and biological diversity wild forests provide.
Excessive clearcutting and bulldozing roads into public forests transforms natural forestland into commercial public-private plantations (monopolies), just as medieval ‘common land’ was transformed into profit seeking, rent-seeking capital assets. It’s essential to remember that capital has no moral, no ethical, no ecological purpose, none. Capital never compensates wildlife or nature for theft (‘taking’) of territory. Liquidation, profit, and accumulation of wealth defines capital’s raison-d’etre.
Trickle-down fascism is a throwback to medieval feudal systems when serfs were run off the land and rural populations declined. Those who stayed behind were starved into submission, using similar aims and methods (control/deterrence) as intended with sanctions, war and genocide today in Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, Sudan, Yemen and now, Iran.
Government sophistry and mass deception rule deforestation/desertification programs. Only a handful of scientists push false narratives touting mechanical “thinning” as an effective wildfire containment strategy – funded, of course, by the BLM, Forest Service, and industrial sawmills and logging companies.
Honest scientific inquiry reveals that mechanical thinning increases wind velocity, dries out soils and warms the local microclimate. These factors often increase fire intensity and the rate of spread in high winds. Tree mortality, blowdown, and carbon emissions increase after ‘thinning’ interior forests. Deserts expand.
Fear-mongering based on wild, unsupported assumptions about the extreme risk, or high probability of a catastrophic wildfire are repeated ad nauseam. The agency’s own research, however, indicates:
Fire likelihood, or burn probability (BP), is the Fsim-modeled annual likelihood that a wildfire will burn a given point or location.
The average BP for catchments (in Gallatin County) ranges from 0 to 0.0098, with a mean of 0.0021. Thus, a given catchment has about a 1 in 476 chance of burning in any given year. (See: Gilbertson-Day, et al. (2017) Northern Region Wildfire Risk Assessment Internal Report; unpublished.)
Mechanical thinning is very costly. Thinning is commercial logging. Thinning and clearcut logging consistently lose money. Our wild forests and rural residents deserve better. Fight back directly or consider sending the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and CounterPunch a small gift so their excellent advocacy continues on your behalf.
We can experience Mother Earth with gratitude as a vibrant living whole. Wild forests grace us with great joy and wisdom. To live responsibly in and among wild forests is possible, even essential to our well-being.
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